At first I thought this wasn't such a bad idea (how else would such a class be implemented/structured?) but with this example in particular (alpha), drawing a Sprite where, say, alpha = 0.5, and which has many children, will result in each child Sprite blending into each other, since all of their alpha values are now at 50%

The desired result is that the object as a whole would be at 50% transparency and blends only with the background, and not with Objects that are within itself.

I thought of each parent Sprite object to be drawn to a Texture2D using a render target, and then applying the alpha to the Texture2D instead. That way, the object as a whole would have a transparency of 50% and not every child Sprite. But to have each Sprite applied to a Texture2D using a render target... would such a thing not be very taxing on the cpu?

My question then is... what is the best implementation of a Sprite class that has this functionality? It really is basically trying to replicate the MovieClip class in AS3. How could this be replicated in C#/XNA?